This explores in much more depth many of themes I tried to explain/touched in my paper on ARC. The benefits of unregulated capitalism but only for the racially/ethnically/religiously defined in-group. www.illiberalism.org/quinn-slobod...

Of course the former Revolutionary Communists have come out in support of fox hunters. Let’s hope the BBC doesn’t invite them to both sides cruelty to animals.

It’s reassuring that the audience for this drivel is very small.

Excellent. While living in the New Forest I witnessed many “trial” hunts where they were using terriers to flush out foxes to “accidentally” chase. They trampled over nesting sites & scattered the deer. Absolute menace to wildlife.

All the Brits that signed this, despite their alleged commitment to free-speech, would never condemn what the MAGA government is doing now in its name. westminsterdeclaration.org

Antidote to the madness.

It’s quite alarming how many members of the British right are siding with the chaos: MAGA Christian nationalism & Putin. There’s no real conservatives left. The effects of Brexit, the anti-woke reactionary backlash, the pandemic, & X mean they detest modern Britain within a secular liberal Europe.

The Free Speech Union, GB News, and Spiked all care passionately about free speech will all be incensed by this and offering their support.

It’s also clear from all the evidence that Britain’s media is far more interested in hearing from reactionary voices. Alternatives are framed and dismissed as hysterical or inauthentic such as young women opposing the fossil fuel industry.

This is timely and well done. I’ve also been picking up this phenomenon for a while via conservations with students and school teachers. Generally, young women are more motivated to do the reading, write essays and study social subjects. They will fight the backlash.

None of the hard right’s pronatalist policies have worked in Hungary. But this won’t matter.

No one argue that America isn’t a post truth society when a conspiracy theory can help elect a President but evidence of a real conspiracy can’t bring him down.

This from scholars who are supposed to be critically alert to the use of AI in education submitting to an editor of a journal who is a leading critical voice on AI in education. If we can get such total epistemic collapse here, what must it be like in other fields?

This is bleak stuff. Every social science student should understand how America got here. www.city-journal.org/article/manh...

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Hope this analysis informs and inspires successful resistance to Trump and big money in both parties that aim to destroy public education as a public good: futureschools.substack.com/p/this-year-...

I was going to share a horrible ad hominem attack on Robin Ince by a real pos in the Spectator. But thought better of it. Robin is such a thoughtful and talented guy, who is a pleasure to talk to. Saw his show twice at this year’s Fringe and enjoyed his poignant poetry.

This year’s Reith Lectures are about structure v agency, but with no real appreciation of how little agency 99% of the pop. has. Maybe because they had to offer some kind of hope. But look at how easily X became what it is today & its outsized influence despite this. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand...

British multi millionaire émigrés to an Islamic authoritarian petrochemical state funding a propaganda channel that tells its audience Britain is becoming an authoritarian Islamic state and petrol cars shouldn’t be banned. 🤔

Persons with significant control of All Perspectives Media that owns and funds GBNews are also based in the UAE. The channel that tells the world Britain is an authoritarian hell hole that is being invaded by immigrants and is impoverishing itself by pursuing net-zero.

All Europeans today share common ancestors within the last ~1,000 years, after the invention of Anglo-Saxon England that racists bang on about.

How did Shane Williams pass a screen test as pundit despite having absolutely no technical insight into the game? #UBBvSCA Rugby’s answer to Colin Jackson. He’s so bad he needs muting.

Justin Webb, in a far more consequential position as presenter of a flagship news programme, has repeatedly violated impartiality rules. If he had a similar warning, it clearly had no effect and he’s been allowed to continue.

2025 was the year AI hit hard in education after a long lead in If anyone's left with a job in the social sciences and humanities to keep studying it critically in the future, here's a reading list I've been compilung all year to get you going

Any recommended reading for the relationship between Empire, war/violence, Christianity, dehumanising the Other? Doesn’t seem like there’s much new here. * *Understand that it’s complicated & Christianity also helped humanise the Other.

This is one of the most important documents produced this year. At a time when many of our professional organizations are punting, @aaup.org has been leading on EdTech, AI, academic freedom & faculty governance. I'm humbled to be joining the team that authored this report.

How is all adults (22/23) so close? The number of SNP supporters who don’t think it’s exaggerated accounts for this? Suggests misinformation/radicalisation hits harder up here.

In any analysis of the populist radical/far right it's important to distinguish between the in-group constructed in discourse, whose communities become poorer by these politics, & the in-group that economically benefits from its attacks on regulation & net-zero, international cronyism, & corruption.

Wonder why young people find X and Facebook so repulsive.

Reform’s emerging Christian ethnonationalism, attacks on welfare recipients, advocacy for fossil fuels, low or no taxes for the wealthy, all pointing towards regressive neoliberalism - the rewards of unregulated globally mobile capital - but only for the in-group inc. foreign friends & donors.

Wonder how many Bigfoot would there would need to be for a viable population that wouldn’t pass on genetic diseases? How many calories a day would one need to eat? How do they hunt or forage? Why do they not leave any trace? How do they rear their young? In crèches?

Delighted this piece is now live on @theverge.com: I've spent months investigating how a supposed war against the "censorship-industrial complex" has been used by the US right to wage war against misinformation research – and free speech itself – across the world. Please do give it a read.

How do we deal with framings such as this? Reform has outsourced its vetting process to HNH yet it’s described here as a dark money “pro censorship lobby group”.

If Marshall is opposed to connecting faith to politics, I don’t know connecting it looks like.His ARC, a political project, is all about ‘returning’ to God, finding purpose through God, by defending ‘Judeo-Christian’ ‘Western Civilisation’ from its mortal enemies who are ‘destroying’ it from within.

No one from History Reclaimed or the whole reactionary history camp seems to have any idea of or any interest in how history is actually taught in English and Welsh schools. The movement is highly dependent on straw men. Key Stage (11-13) on the left and GCSE AQA spec. on the right.

North Berwick moons

Just tuned into the Today programme on Radio 4 for the first time in a while. Justin Webb’s politics are so poorly disguised it’s an insult to listeners.

I'm old enough to remember 'white genocide' being a fringe neo-Nazi conspiracy theory. Now its being pushed by the world's richest man on his platform and its author can voice it on an Ofcom regulated national broadcaster with no pushback and no consequence.

Why doesn’t the wildly popular GBNews do a series fronted by History Reclaimed? Starkey and Ferguson could tell everyone how great the Empire was actually and that the people it colonised, brutalised and exploited should be grateful. This is GBNews’s owner’s view too, he’d front up the money.

This isn’t shocking at all. Camus was on GB News a few months ago describing immigration as ‘white genocide’. Great Replacement Theory is orthodoxy in this community where Reform, Conservatives and far-right coexist.

This is typically great on Orr and Yarvin. It beggars belief that their bigotry and hackneyed reactionary tropes are taken to represent intellectual discourse. Such a low bar.

Interview with Jayna Devani - International Education Lead at OpenAI - on the future of education. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

Everything - the political economy of information - the structural incentives - whatever we want to call the systemic drivers - is all going the opposite direction.

Imagine meeting a time traveller from the 80s who only knows the domination of the Murdoch press, explaining the information revolution, the ability to access all the world’s knowledge through our phones, and then explaining the public is still somehow grossly misinformed.

Brits overestimate the amount of Muslims in the UK by 350%.

Comparing Gemini to Grok on ‘National IQ’.

🚨Fantastic online conference here for digital sociologists, platforms studies, STS and surveillance studies folk 🚨

Here’s transcript with the text missing from the broadcast. downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith...

The BBC is accountable to its viewers & listeners not foreign electoral autocracies. Everyone should a complaint, otherwise nothing will happen. www.bbc.co.uk/contact/comp...

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1